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VOLUME 6 • NU MBER 4 • SOrt
FALL 20 00
A Texas-Size Wh
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Anatomy of a 'Gene Spill':
Do We Really Need Genetically Engineered Food?
BY PETER ROSSET
PETER ROSSET HAS A PH.D. IN AGRICULTURAL ECOLOGY AND IS CO-DIRECTOR OF FOOD FIRST.
Kraft Foods announced a nationwide recall of taco shells yesterday after confirming that they contained
a genetically engineered corn not approved for human consum ption. The recall covers Taco Bell Home
Originals Packages ... Kraft, a subsidiary of Phillip Morris ... [sells] the Taco bell product line... under
license from the Taco Bell restaurant chain, a unit ofTricon Global Restaurants .. . Kraft bought the shells
from ... Sabritas, a subsidiary of PepsiCo. The flour came from a mill owned by Azteca Milling .. .Azteca
is controlled by Gruma S.A. of Mexico, the world's largest tortilla producer, but is partly owned by Archer
Daniels Midland, the giant Illinois grain processor. The corn in question, known as Starlink ... [was]
developed by Aventis CropScience ... Aventis CropScience S.A. .. unite[s] the crop protection business
of Rhone-Poulenc with the crop protection activities of Hoechst Schering AgrEvo.
-The New York Times, September 23 and 30, 2000, and http:! hvww.aventis.com
0
n Monday, September 18, 2000, a coalition ofbiotech critics announced laboratory tests
detecting the presence of genetically engineered (GE) corn, of a variety not approved for
human consumption, in Taco Bell brand taco shells. 1 The StarLink corn variety in question produces a bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) insecticide protein called Cry9C, a potential human
food allergen because it is not broken down by the digestive process. Later the same day, Aventis CropScience, the biotech giant which produces StarLink seeds, responded by challenging
the credibility of Genetic ID, the independent laboratory which had found the illicit presence
of the variety. 2 On September 22 Kraft announced a recall of the taco shells/ and on September
cominutd on pag,~ 2
gene spill n (2000) !COMPARE
oil spill! : an accidental release of
an artificially engineered genetic
construct into the envi ronment
or the human food system.
29 the USDA and the EPA jointly
announced that Aventis, at their
'urging,' had agreed to buy back the
entire year's harvest of StarLink
corn fi-om embattled farmers.4 On
October 2 the FDA belatedly
revealed that its own laboratories
had confirmed the results of Genetic
lD's disputed tests, announcing that
it would now begin test a few other
processed food products for the first
time. 5 It wasn't long before the original testers found traces of StarLink
elsewhere, notably in Safeway
brand taco shells, and more product
recalls followed.6 As many as 350
flour mills around the country have
apparently received shipments of
this GE corn variety, and there are
doubts as to how careful they have
all been in terms of keeping it out of
the human food supply.7
The New York Times pointed out
that this incident "shows how difficult it can be to contain genes once
they get into the fi eld and how
hard it can to keep different varieties of crops from co-mingling." 8
The usually pro-biotech newspaper
speculated that corn for human
consumption could have been
wind pollinated by the StarLink
variety grown nearby for animal
feed, its only approved use, or that
genetically modified seed could
have "been left in barges or trucks
that are later used to carry nonmodified crops." [n a later story the
paper added the possibility of
intentional misrepresentation of
one corn variety for another, driven
by the profit motive, as corn for
human consumption receives a
higher price than for animal feed.9
Farmers point out that true separation ofGE and non-GE crops in
the food chain, or 'segregation' as
it is called by industry, is a 'myth,'
impossible to achieve in practice
when one considers the multiple
use of planters, combines, augers,
grain elevators, trucks, mills, storage
bins and facilities, etc.'0 Kraft itself
has called for an end to the approval
of varieties that are only acceptable
for animal consumption, given the
difficulty of assuring that they do
not enter the human food supply.''
Unfortunately, genetic pollution is
not easy to contain. Unlike an oil
spill, a gene spill cannot be contained by throwing a boom around
it. Once genes are taken out of the
laboratory they can move fi-om
plant to plant by natural pollination,
even hybridizing with related but
different species, winding up in
genomes in which they have never
been tested and where they may
have unpredictable effects. 12 One
can imagine a Bt pesticide gene, like
the one in Starlink, moving into
ucts. In this way, industry could
continue to blithely tell us that no
one has fallen sick from consuming
a GE product, an easy 'fiction' to
maintain as nobody is conducting
the epidemiological studies needed
to detect such illnesses. 14
Corporate Concentration:
'Accidents Will Happen,
But Only Hit and Run'
In studying this case we are struck
by the dense network of transnational corporations (TNCs}
involved, and the relationships
between them-symptomatic, we
feel, of larger problems in our food
system. A food processor (Kraft)
owned by a tobacco company
(Phillip Morris), pays a licensing
fee to the world's largest fast food
corporation (Tricon , which owns
Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut),
itself a spin-off from PepsiCo, and
buys the taco shells from a direct
subsidiary of Pepsi (Sabritas), who
Kraft itself has called for an end to the approval of
varieties that are only acceptable for animal consumption, given the difficulty of assuring that they
do not enter the human food supply.
wild plants in neighboring ecosystems, which would then begin to
express insecticidal properties with
unknown effects on non-pest
insects and the food chains that
depend on them.u Or if the Cry9C
insecticide protein were to continue
to appear unpredictably in our food
supply, serious food allergy reactions could arise in an apparently
random pattern that would be inexplicable to epidemiologists unaware
of an underlying distribution of GE
contaminated processed food prod-
bought the flour from the company (Gruma) who produces over
half of the tortillas consumed in
the world' 5 and is partially owned
by the nation's largest grain
processor (ADM}, a major campaign contributor to both polirjcal
parties, found guilty at various
times of price fixing and ami-trust
violations. 16 ADM in turn bought
the corn from farmers who bought
the seed from a biotech conglomerate (Aventis CropScience),
formed by the merger of two
chemical companies (AgrEvo and
Rh6ne-Poulenc), one of whom